Killing Monica

  The kind of kitchen that cost four hundred thousand dollars.

  “But so what?” Pandy said to Henry when she stopped by his office to sign some papers. “What’s money, when it comes to love?”

  “And is Jonny paying for his kitchen?” Henry asked.

  Pandy blushed. “Jonny is paying for half. I’m paying the other half. I mean, really, Henry,” she said, reacting to his horrified expression. “It is my loft.”

  “That’s exactly the point. Jonny moved into a space you’ve already paid for. Therefore, he should be paying for the renovations.”

  “Everyone says the biggest mistake in marriage is keeping track. It’s not going to be fifty-fifty all the time,” Pandy admonished him.

  “That’s exactly what worries me. Please tell me you had him sign a prenup.”

  “Of course I did!” Pandy exclaimed.

  She had never lied to Henry before. And certainly not about something so important. On the other hand, it wasn’t Henry’s business. And if she ever, for one minute, believed that Jonny would screw her over financially—well, she never would have married him! Besides, Jonny’s career was booming. Some men from Vegas had contacted him, and wanted to meet him in LA the next month.

  “Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to Vegas?” Pandy had asked.

  “That’s not how these things work.” Jonny smiled at her like she was an adorable nitwit.

  “How’s the book coming?” Henry asked again two weeks later.

  “I’m thinking a change of scenery might help,” Pandy said, feeling guilty.

  “Good idea. Why don’t you go to Wallis? Work undisturbed for a bit,” Henry said. Her childhood home was completely isolated.

  “But then I couldn’t see Jonny every day!” she protested. “I was thinking more of LA. What do they call those pointy trees that are everywhere?”

  “Cypress trees?”

  “Yes. The cypress trees. I find them very inspiring. They always remind me of Joan Didion.”

  Closing her ears to Henry’s protests, she flew off to LA with Jonny. They stayed at the Chateau Marmont, “in Monica’s new favorite room,” the desk clerk said, waving the key on its scarlet tassel as he led them down the brown-carpeted hallway to number 29. It held a white baby grand piano, and Jonny turned out to be a man who could play a little.

  They had a ball, with Pandy staging intimate champagne evenings with her Hollywood pals during which Jonny played show tunes and everyone else sang.

  And then, having heard they were in town, Peter Pepper himself called.

  Pandy was shocked, but then pleasantly surprised when it turned out that PP was a huge fan of Jonny’s. A dinner for four was arranged on the terrace at the Chateau; PP was bringing his girlfriend. What was decidedly less pleasant was her identity: Lala Grinada.

  Pandy couldn’t believe it. Lala, the very same actress who’d tried to steal Doug Stone to get even.

  This, Pandy decided, was going to be interesting.

  Naturally, Jonny and PP—who knew nothing of this history and would have dismissed it as stupid girl stuff if they had—got on like a house on fire. They had tennis, golf, and cigars in common. They had other men in common, guys with names like Sonny Bats and Tony Hammer. Pandy and Lala, meanwhile, had both nothing and too much in common.

  SondraBeth was right about one thing, though: Lala was a snob. She and Pandy managed to studiously ignore each other throughout the entire dinner. It was an old British girls’ boarding school trick, and Pandy knew it well. Indeed, she might have managed to avoid talking to Lala at all if Jonny hadn’t gotten up to go to the bathroom, leaving her alone with the other two.

  Since PP couldn’t be bothered to make conversation, he nudged Lala to speak. Lala wobbled her head on the stalk of her neck and said, “I’ve always thought Jonny was just gorgeous,” which meant something entirely different in British than it did in American.

  Pandy smiled coldly. “Have you?”

  And then, of course, she and Jonny ended up having their first fight.

  Over Lala, naturally. Pandy was sure he’d begun flirting with Lala when he’d returned to the table. In the elevator going back to their room, she passionately informed him that if she ever saw him flirting with another woman again—well, he’d better watch out.

  Then Jonny apologized and they had mind-blowing sex on the terrace, where it was just possible that other guests might have caught a peek.

  And if they had? They would have been “envious,” Jonny said.

  Afterward, back in bed and cuddled into the down pillows, Jonny kissed the top of her head. “We don’t ever have to see PP and Lala again if you don’t want to.” He yawned and rolled over. “They’re silly people anyway. They’re not real. Not like we are, babe.”

  “No, they’re not,” she agreed, curving herself behind him and stroking the striated muscles of his shoulder.

  She loved him so much then.

  * * *

  They returned to New York and got back to work. And this time, it really felt like they were partners on the same track. By nine a.m., they were both up and ready to go. She with her Earl Grey tea with lemon, seated in front of the computer, ready to begin another day with Monica; he with his protein drink and Nike warm-up pants, preparing to head to the gym.

  Monica was rolling along at last. Nevertheless, Pandy felt a vague frustration. Marriage, she believed, had grounded and deepened her, and she wanted her work to reflect this as well.

  “Of course I want this to be the best Monica book ever. But there’s so much else I can write,” she said one night when they were in the kitchen and Jonny was cooking.

  “Is there?” Jonny asked as he rinsed some asparagus.

  She explained how she’d always wanted to be taken seriously, to be considered a “literary writer.”

  “Then do it,” Jonny said fervently. “Be literary. Be whatever you want, babe.”

  “It means taking a chance,” she said. “It means I’ll probably make less money.”

  Jonny dismissed this. “If you want something, you’ve got to take it.”

  “Huh?” Pandy said.

  “You don’t ask for it. You take it. How do you think I got to be the manager of the hottest restaurant in the city when I was just a kid? Eighteen years old, and I’ve got every pretty woman begging me to take her number.”

  “Jonny,” Pandy said, laughing, “this isn’t about sex.”

  “You want people to think you’re literary? Then be literary,” Jonny said, as if the answer were just that simple.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Pandy tried to explain. “You can’t just demand things and expect to get them. You have to earn your status.”

  Jonny laughed. “Earn your status? You have to take your status. Listen, babe,” he said, motioning for her to sit. “Do you think I really give a rat’s ass about French food? The only reason I ended up going to France was because I needed to get out of town, and one of my buddies had a house in Saint-Tropez. When I saw what a big deal all the women were making out of the food…” Jonny shrugged.

  Pandy nodded, thinking she understood. The next day, they both went back to work, like two little trains chugging around and around a track.

  * * *

  And then, after four months of labor, Jonny brought home a magnum of expensive red wine and said they were celebrating.

  “That’s amazing!” Pandy declared, after Jonny told her all about the restaurant deal in Vegas and how it was finally coming through.

  PP, it seemed, had put Jonny in touch with his pal Tony Hammer, who was some kind of Hollywood “guy” who had access to a celebrity clientele that liked to invest in restaurants. That made the Vegas guys happy, and in any case, the long and short of it was that Jonny was going to be opening a restaurant in Las Vegas.

  Pandy was outwardly thrilled. But secretly, she was nervous. For she’d learned another thing about Jonny: He had far less money than she’d imagined. He had to take the money he earned and
put it back into his restaurants. Adding another money-gobbling venture to what was already in the red didn’t seem like a good idea. But what did she know?

  Instead of confronting him directly about it, she found herself pouting and then claiming to be angry that he’d “lied,” at least about PP. Hadn’t he sworn he was never going to talk to PP again?

  Jonny pointed out that he’d never said he would never talk to PP again. He’d said Pandy didn’t have to if she didn’t want to. And there she went, being all emotional about business again. Which was the very reason he hadn’t told her about the one or two occasions when PP had been in New York and he and Jonny had gotten together.

  While it disturbed her that her husband was having secret meetings with the head of the studio that produced Monica, she couldn’t exactly object. Especially when Jonny reminded her that she was the one who had introduced Jonny to PP in the first place.

  On another night, a couple of weeks later, when they were again enjoying their enormous new kitchen, she once again tried to explain. “It’s just that…” She faltered, trying to find a way to express her feelings of dismay. “I guess I’m a little hurt. I thought we were a team. I thought we were supposed to be doing things together.”

  “But we are!” Jonny beamed. He swung a stool around and motioned for her to sit. He took her hand. “I want you as my partner,” he exclaimed, as if they’d discussed this before.

  “Your partner?” Pandy was confused.

  “In the restaurant!” Jonny crowed proudly. “You’ve been a great partner in marriage, so I want to make you a partner in the business as well.”

  “Really?” Pandy sat back, knowing Jonny expected her to be excited, but unable to push down a slight feeling of dread. “What does that even mean? What would I have to do?” At that point, she was up against her Monica deadline and desperately needed to finish. She didn’t have time to get involved in some restaurant in Vegas.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Jonny said, smiling. “You don’t have to do anything. All you have to do is write a check.”

  “But—”

  “You and I will be fifty-fifty partners. Together, we’ll own thirty percent. I have four other investors lined up for the other seventy percent; guys in Vegas that the LA guy hooked me up with. But you and I will be the majority. We’ll each get fifteen percent of the profits. Look,” he said, scribbling numbers on a piece of paper.

  Pandy put her hand over his to stop him.

  “It’s okay. I understand the numbers,” she said.

  * * *

  For days, she was horribly uneasy. She’d always had an anxious relationship with money. She loved beautiful things, but felt guilty every time she splurged, so she didn’t splurge often. When she was growing up in Wallis, money wasn’t mentioned, except in the negative and oft-repeated phrase, “We can’t afford it.” And the reality was, they couldn’t. So when money did happen to come along, it was supposed to be saved for the proverbial rainy day.

  She wished she could have talked to Henry about her dilemma, but she already knew what he would say: Don’t do it.

  But if she didn’t do it, what would Jonny do? Would he leave her?

  She decided to put off her decision until she’d at least gone with Jonny to Vegas to look at the space.

  And so, despite her Monica deadline, and without telling Henry, she snuck off with Jonny to Vegas three days later. The potential restaurant space was located in a major casino, where she and Jonny stayed in the Joker Suite, which contained a fountain that could be turned into a Jacuzzi. They met up with a couple of pasty-faced men in gray suits, one of whom had known Jonny for years.

  This man revealed to Pandy that before he’d gotten married, Jonny had been known as a bit of a gambler.

  Please, no, Pandy thought. Gambling made her want to cry.

  She wanted to cry when she saw the same sad, chain-smoking women at the slot machines at midnight and then again at eight the next morning. The glitz and glamour and the celebrities were great, but it was on the backs of women like these that Vegas wealth was built. It was all those little dollars from those little old ladies who should have known better. And while Pandy would remind herself that every vice, including gambling, was considered a choice, it still somehow didn’t seem fair.

  And it would turn out that, like those little old ladies at the slot machines, she, too, “should have known better.”

  Instead, she wrote out a check for two hundred thousand dollars. Nevertheless, before she handed it to Jonny, she did scold him about how, at this rate, her advance would be gone before she’d even finished the third Monica book. This was a one-time thing, she insisted, and she wouldn’t be able to do it again. After all, she had only been paid a quarter of her advance so far, and wouldn’t get another quarter until she completed the book.

  Jonny laughed this off, but pointedly tiptoed around her for the next three weeks so she could finish the manuscript.

  Which she did. Receiving the check two weeks later.

  And once again, Jonny was the loving, affectionate, caring man she thought she’d married, surprising her with a pair of one-carat diamond earrings to celebrate, along with a piece of astounding news: Architectural Digest wanted to photograph their loft. They wanted to do a ten-page spread, featuring Pandy and Jonny as the perfect example of a modern New York couple. The issue would come out on Valentine’s Day.

  It was all so very Monica again, especially as the other Monica—SondraBeth Schnowzer—and the so-called love of her life, Doug Stone, had managed to become first engaged and then disengaged in the past nine months.

  Pandy had barely noticed.

  The shoot took two days. The photographer got playful photos of her and Jonny feeding each other in the kitchen, and even an adorable shot of the two of them in bed, peeking over the covers at each other. “When I first heard about you guys getting married, I didn’t believe it was real,” the photographer remarked. “But now that I’ve seen you together, it’s obvious you really are in love.”

  “Yes,” Jonny said. And turning to Pandy, he gave her that special look.

  “We’re lucky,” Pandy said with a confident sigh.

  * * *

  But she didn’t feel so lucky a few days later when her editor called with the corrections on Monica. Her editor suggested that since Pandy was married, maybe it was time for Monica to get married as well.

  Pandy lost it.

  “No. I will not allow Monica to get married!” she told her editor over the phone. “It makes Monica seem weak. Like she has to do what every other woman does. Like she has to give in to convention.”

  Undeterred, her editor pointed out that she was now married.

  “Yes, I suppose I am,” Pandy grumbled. “But Monica doesn’t have to do everything I do. Monica is not me. She’s a beacon of singlehood for all the women out there who will always be single, and who have fought honorably for their single lives. Meaning they have the right to be accepted and left alone, instead of being constantly hunted down and tortured with all this marriage crap.” She hung up in disgust to find Jonny standing behind her.

  He was beaming.

  “Well?” she demanded, so riled that she wanted to tell him to wipe that silly grin off his face.

  “That was my idea, babe. Monica. Getting married. I told PP that since you and I were married, maybe Monica ought to get married, too. And he agreed.”

  Pandy’s knees buckled. Overcome with a case of the dry heaves, she had to run into the bathroom.

  When she came out, she tore into him like a madwoman.

  Why was he doing this? Why was he messing with her career? Did he think she didn’t know what she was doing? Her tantrum ended with her screaming red-faced at the top of her lungs, “Keep your dirty mitts off Monica!”

  The last thing she remembered before he walked out was the look on his face. It was blank, as if he no longer wished to know her.

  He said: “No one ever speaks to me like that and gets aw
ay with it.”

  Pandy called Henry in tears.

  “I don’t understand what you’re so upset about,” Henry said sarcastically. “Just agree that Monica might get married in the next book. And when the next book comes along, you’ll see. You might not even be married by then. And then Monica can get divorced!”

  She knew that Henry was only trying to make her feel better by making her laugh, but she was too angry to see the humor. “Actually, I don’t need to worry about it. Because there isn’t going to be another Monica book. This is the last one. When this one is finished, I’m going to write that literary novel I’ve always been talking about.”

  She managed to spend another hour alone before she called Jonny twelve times on his cell phone. He finally answered, revealing that he was with one of his “buddies.” Pandy convinced him to come home and apologized profusely.

  It took him three days to defrost. But he finally did, when she showed up at his restaurant with a peace offering: an ornate antique silver bottle stopper. He held it up briefly before returning it to its box, although not before catching the eye of the waitress who was passing by, and Pandy realized that she had miscalculated again. The silver stopper was the kind of thing she loved, but he had no use for. And even as she was buying it, she had recalled how he’d told her he hated old things; how antiques reminded him of the decrepit old people who’d surrounded him in the building he’d grown up in with his mother and grandmother—but she’d dismissed this and bought it anyway. It seemed to be some kind of metaphor for their relationship: In giving him the antique objet, she was trying to get him to accept a piece of her true self.

  Or maybe the part of her he just didn’t seem to want to see.

  And all of a sudden, that revolving top of fear was back, spinning in her head and keeping her awake at night. Her thoughts were a tsunami of what-ifs: What if Jonny had only married her for her money? What if Jonny kept asking for money? What if Jonny lost all their money, and they had to sell the loft? What if Jonny took all her money and left her for another woman?

  She’d be ruined. Emotionally and financially. And there wouldn’t be a damn thing she could do about it, because she hadn’t made him sign a prenup. Not only had she not insisted on his signing this now very valuable-seeming piece of paper—she was too ashamed of her stupidity to tell anyone.